U.S. SOCCER TEAM HINDERED

By ALEX YANNIS

Published: April 22, 1985

The road to the World Cup in Mexico next summer is becoming more treacherous for the United States national team because of the confusion in the professional leagues that normally provide the players.

The North American Soccer League has disappeared, at least for the coming outdoor season, going into dormancy because it had too few solvent franchises to form a league. So there is no regular, demanding outdoor league keeping players fit and game-sharp.

The teams in the Major Indoor Soccer League, which has just begun its playoffs, have been reluctant to give players time off to practice and play with the national team.

The United States has four World Cup qualifying games next month, but has been unable to settle on a steady team. It has have been using mostly amateurs in preparatory exhibition games, such as yesterday's 2-1 victory over a semipro club, the New York Greek-Americans, at Hofstra University Stadium on Long Island.

''We have a lot of talented players in this country,'' said Alkis Panagoulias, the coach of the national team. ''The major problem is that we do not have a competitive league to give these players the kind of competition they need. That has been the most frustrating problem.''

What infuriated him more than the lack of a competitive outdoor league, Panagoulias said last week, was the lack of cooperation on the part of the M.I.S.L. He said that, except for the San Diego Sockers, everyone else in the M.I.S.L. considered the national team's success or failure irrelevant to the M.I.S.L.'s business.

''I don't want to talk about them and Earl Foreman because I'll say bad things about them,'' Panagoulias said about the M.I.S.L. and its former commissioner, who stepped down last month after serving in that post since the league's inception in 1978.

Panagoulias said that even if he had all the M.I.S.L. players he wanted, it would not be much help to the national team unless he could have them long enough to get them re-adjusted to outdoor play. He said that, right now, ''only two or three'' of the players in the M.I.S.L. can be effective outdoors.

''I want the people out there to understand that soccer and indoor soccer are two entirely different things,'' Panagoulias said. ''I'm discovering more and more as I go along that indoor players have a lot of difficulty playing outdoor soccer.''

Arnold Trachtenberg, the trainer of the World Cup team, who had worked in that capacity for the Cosmos for five years, said indoor players had to increase substantially their level of fitness for outdoors. He compared indoor players with sprinters and soccer players with marathoners.

''Besides their fitness,'' Trachtenberg said, ''they have to make drastic adjustments tactically and technically. Alkis has given Hugo Perez and Kevin Crow special programs to bring up their level of fitness.''

Crow and Perez, both of the Sockers, were key players for the Americans when they eliminated the Netherlands Antilles in a qualifying series last fall, but their prepararation for next month's matches against Trinidad-Tobago and Costa Rica will be limited. San Diego finished with the best record in the regular season and is expected to go the distance in the M.I.S.L. playoffs, which could last until the first week in June.

Both games against Trinidad- Tobago will be played in the United States, May 15 in St. Louis and May 19 in Torrance, Calif. The first game against Costa Rica will be in that country, on May 26, and the return game at Torrance on May 31.

The winner of this group will then go into another round, against Honduras and the winner of a qualifying group that involves Canada, Guatemala and Haiti. The winner of that next round will join the host country, Mexico; the defending champion, Italy, and 21 other nations for the 1986 World Cup, scheduled for May 31 to June 29 in nine Mexican cities.